The Problem
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch, according to the comedian Lily Tomlin. Science says she’s correct. We only absorb fragments of the world around us at any particular moment. Our memory only retains a fraction of these fragments and then reconstructs them into what we each call reality.
Okay. We are now aware of this fact. So, what do we do when trying to grasp what’s really going on with any particular issue? Say there’s an organization-wide problem and your boss expects you to determine what it is and how to fix it. We encounter this situation, or similar ones, constantly. To make matters worse, your boss wants you to produce results within the next 30 days and your organization employs about 25,000 people, serves over 600,000 unique patients, includes 25 different health care delivery facilities distributed over 4,000 square miles, and has a $4.5 billion operating budget. You need a rational and accepted basis for quickly evaluating the problem and defining a viable solution within an extraordinarily complex organization.
The Solution
Lily Tomlin’s quote offers a solution by mentioning the word collective. You’re never going to know reality, but you can purposely gather diverse ideas to improve your understanding of the problem and then draw conclusions to recommend a viable solution. What’s more, there’s a foolproof way to gather this information across a large, culturally diverse, and geographically dispersed organization within a short time.
1. Enlist Leadership – Start by drawing on the authority of the top leader in your organization ultimately responsible for resolving the problem. This individual notifies top, middle and frontline leadership of this initiative, enlisting their ongoing reinforcement throughout problem identification, recommendation development, and solution implementation success.
2. Select the Team – You’re the change agent, chosen by leadership, to spearhead this effort on their behalf. With that conferred authority, identify an initial group to define the problem. For example, there’s a massive digital transformation project failure. Selecting the people to help understand the problem includes meetings with a manageable number of participants, say seven to nine individuals at a time. More meeting participants diverts focus from collecting information to managing multiple communication channels. Consider three separate meetings reflecting the organization’s leadership structure, such as, top, middle, and frontline management.
3. Prepare Logistics – Time is important, so completing technology, logistic, recording, and research tasks beforehand helps keep the focus on collaboration once each meeting starts. For example, prearrange the room’s technology, including a wall monitor and computer connected to it.
4. Organize the Room – Assuming in-person meetings, logistically, a round table is critical to collaborative meeting participation. Round tables are often difficult to find, so a square table or several tables organized with equal sides stops an individual from finding a position at the head and exerting associated power.
5. Document What’s Important – Identify a scribe, someone who records key findings or facts during meetings and refrains from contributing their opinion about the problem. As the change agent, you’ll facilitate the scribe’s recording, instead of transcribing every spoken word like a court reporter. The scribe uses the computer with their display projected on a wall monitor in front of the room. Everyone sees what the scribe records, requesting corrections whenever necessary.
6. Do Your Research – Examine the issues before starting meetings by reviewing available documentation on the problem.
7. Conduct Interviews – Interview each of the three tiers of selected management participants individually before meeting in groups. Conducting these interviews gives you an opportunity to explain the purpose of this initiative, collecting diverse input from several people familiar with the problem, drawing logical conclusions from their contribution, and recommending a solution. Facts are information independently provided by at least two different individuals. Guarantee anonymity to promote unfiltered input. These separate interviews also inform the agent about what each individual meeting participant does and what they care about in terms of the problem under analysis.
8. Facilitate Group Meetings – Start these meetings by asking each participant to prepare two lists. The first list should include the top three to five factors that could have contributed to the problem. The second should identify what might have prevented the problem. The collaborative dialogue always takes off from there. The results provide patterns emerging from the collective reality of the participants. These facts then serve to inform the agent about potential solutions. Often, they also inform the agent about conducting subsequent sessions with additional groups carefully selected from the attendees participating in the prior three separate management meetings. The best and easiest way to identify the right people is to ask meeting participants who else to include in subsequent meetings. Eventually, you start hearing repetition about the problem, indicating you don’t need to conduct more meetings
9. Analyze the Results – After all the meetings, the agent analyzes the collective reality into a series of draft findings of facts, conclusions driven from them, and recommendations. The agent then meets with the authorizing leader and proposes a team of seven to nine individuals that meet to review the draft findings, conclusions, and recommendations. The authorizing leader selects these individuals from a list prepared by the agent of the participants in the prior meetings. This new team represents the collective reality of the entire organization, including frontline employees and management from all three tiers of the organization. They collaboratively review the draft findings, conclusions, and recommendations, selecting a final version that they execute during successful implementation.
Your understanding of the problem and the solution will remain a hunch, but at least it’s a collective one.
Source
Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, Directed and performed by Lily Tomlin, 1984, Seattle, Repertory Theatre, Seattle, WA
Jane Wood and Denise Silver, Joint Application Development, 2nd Edition, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, 1995.
